I just installed it via upgrade from 12.10 and it is a bit of a dog, don't recommend it at all.

Desktop totally corrupted, OK until you press enter at the login screen, but once you do that, instead of the login screen going away and loading the wallpaper, it just reduces in size and remains visible and frozen in the middle of the screen, while no wallpaper ever appears. Unity loads around it, and strangely most things appear to work. Conky fonts are unreadable, and checkgmail won't appear in the panel, but launch any other program and it seem to behave normally. This is despite a barrage of error notifications that start to appear shortly afterwards (python and pixbuf-gtk are two that I remember, but there are more than that).

I know people will say it is because I used the upgrade method instead of a fresh install, but I don't think that is so. Whilst Raring was in beta I did a fresh install of one of the versions and it behaved in exactly the same manner, I just foolishly thought they might have fixed it between then and now but I was obviously wrong .

Thank the lord for fsarchiver. I imaged 12.10 before upgrading and have now replaced it, as 13.04 is unusable. It is not as if I have any complicated graphics setup, just bog standard Intel 3000.

I prefer to stick with LTS releases, but I was just reading comments about 13.04 at another distro's forums, and the comments made by people who have tried it were favorable. One of those "YMMV" things, I guess.

Perhaps it is the upgrade path, that is the problem. I have been using the Gnome version (shell 3.6) of 13.04 for about a month with no issues. Its not Unity of course, but the same base. Everything (now) is working fine with no issues. No sound early on, but that was fixed.Actually quite nice, I prefer the shell over cinnamon, unity, mate. I am sure I am in the minority...

But like I said, it behaved in an identical manner when I did a fresh install of one of the beta versions. BTW, I am glad you like gnome-shell, I hate to think of all those gnome devs beavering away out there for nothing and nobody

Hardware does plays an important part of which is the best distro to use

That is true dyfi, but if it can't even cope with an Intel 3000 card - with a native Linux driver - it ain't much good!

I read somewhere that it made a difference if you don't have a second screen attached - it doesn't

I don't think 13.04 has any real advantages over 12.10 so I am not all that bothered by its dismal failure, but you really expect better from Canonical and of course it is likely to have repercussions for Mint 15 as well.

One advantage of 12.10 over 13.04, if nothing else, is that 12.10 is supported all the way up to the release of 14.04, the next LTS. Ubuntu 13.04 starts the cycle of only 9 months support, so 13.04 reaches EOL in January 2014.

tdockery97 wrote:One advantage of 12.10 over 13.04, if nothing else, is that 12.10 is supported all the way up to the release of 14.04, the next LTS. Ubuntu 13.04 starts the cycle of only 9 months support, so 13.04 reaches EOL in January 2014.

Thanks for mentioning that Tod, it makes it even less worth bothering with.

I managed to get both Ubuntu's working in multi-boot scenario now (not easy when they are both clones of each other I can tell you, it doesn't half confuse grub ). Anyway this is what my desktop looks like (the left half anyway, I have to reduce the file size somehow, or I can't post it):

Not pretty is it

I could post the crash logs as well, but they are so huge I doubt you would want to read them (I don't want to read them! ).

There are 4 anyway, python2.7, gtk-pixbuf 32bit and 64 bit (no idea why both it is a 64 bit system) and software-centre.

@Brahim - Hope you have better luck with it than I did

Edit. Here is something strange. I logged in with the guest account and the desktop was normal. I then logged out and in again with my own account and a lot of the corruption had gone away. I still have no wallpaper (and can't set any whichever I choose) but everything else seems to be ok, no crash reports this time.

I don't know about all this. I've been using 13.04, both Ubuntu and Lubuntu, for a few months. Both are working great. I've never been an Ubuntu fan, particularly, but I like 13.04 better than previous releases. It's faster and smoother on my computer.

Different experience on Dell Inspiron i3 Ok let's start with "the ugly":couldn't boot the live cd after creating it with Unetbootin. It kept saying corrupt kernel and bla bla till i tried "try ubuntu without..." option.Let's go to "the bad": In terms of appearance, changes are almost transparent when comparing it with its predecessor 12.04. Same Bolschevik interface Here comes "the good" stuff; Ubuntu 13.04 is much snappier than any previous release: no hiccups no bolschevik. It works like a charm on my pc and took 9 secs to boot Final verdict: "I'm not going back to Ubuntu never" It's totally bolschevik and I don't need to be objective about it anymore

Ran Ubuntu 13.04 development for the last 2 months, except for a few minor glitches along the way (which were quickly resolved) rock solid stable...and a way better experience (on my computer) then either 12.04 or 12.10...Very impressed with it, actually...now that it went final, should get even better as the updates come in...

My computer is a Toshiba laptop with i3core intel processor and graphics....bought about 6 months ago...for me, BEST UBUNTU YET... And Unity is Smoother and snappier to use then ever before....Experience with it by other development users and from those now installing from the final release have been generally very high praise...

So, it looks like that for you Viking, it seems to be very much a YMMV kind of deal, unfortunately...

I like to try out new stuff, but where you like to be a test pilot, I prefer to be the everyday flyer.Testing out new stuff can become addictive, though, I find myself looking for newly stable stuff rather than actually using my computer to achieve anything useful, such is the power of linux distro hopping. And I only tried linux for the first time 6 months ago.

I have decided to remove it and go back to 12.10, at least for now. Maybe I will do a fresh install again later, I will just wait and see, but like tdockery said, by the time I get round to it, the support period will have run out.

There are so many issues with 13.04, and none of them are easily resolvable. Some of them may be of my own making. I suddenly realised last night that because of the bizarre way I installed 13.04 (by upgrade) and then reinstalled 12.10 (by fsarchiver image) I was now running two different Ubuntu distributions, both with the same username and the same home folder. This is a recipe for disaster and always has been. The only way to correctly use a separate home folder with multiple distributions is to have different usernames for each distro. This doesn't account for the initial problems though because to begin with I only had one distro (the upgraded 13.04) with one username.

The other problems are that checkgmail doesn't work (it works but there is no panel icon and the workround to add it - dconf-editor>com>canonical>unity>panel>systray-whitelist [‘all’] has been removed ). I don't know how people live without checkgmail (unless they don't have a gmail account) but I certainly can't. Then there is the complete inability to load any wallpaper - I could live with that, it doesn't bother me too much but it isn't actually desirable. Lastly there is the -38 kernel it runs by default. This kernel is faulty and halves the maximum achievable speed (not the same as actual speed) of some wireless networks. It was discovered over on the Arch forum and I happened upon it when I bought a new router and tried my own experiments. I reported it here: http://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=3706.0 (mint/ubuntu weren't running the -38 kernel at the time). Incidentally the -39 kernel is fine, so is the -37.

Also the speed increases that others have reported were totally invisible to me. In fact it took me much longer to start up because I had to keep shutting down the non-stop crash reports that kept popping up.

excollier wrote:Testing out new stuff can become addictive, though, I find myself looking for newly stable stuff rather than actually using my computer to achieve anything useful, such is the power of linux distro hopping. And I only tried linux for the first time 6 months ago.

So, so true! I'd be embarrassed to admit how many times I've installed/reinstalled/switched back and forth between builds of Mint/Ubuntu in the last few months. The trouble is that if you actually have the free time (I'm retired) it's fun to play around with Linux. I do try to fit in watching movies and listening to music when I'm not doing installs/reinstalls.

Wow, seriously? Out of curiosity, I decided to download Lubuntu 13.04 and give it a whirl. Changing from the /home directory to the /Applications directory in PCManFM yielded this. So much for "release it on this date, no matter what!" distros.